The Usual Suspects Movie Quotes

Can you believe she’s never seen The Usual Suspects?” Liza scoffed. “Liza!” “Relax. We’re just shooting real guns in the house, not watching R-rated movies.

Movies today are bigger, brighter, technically dazzling, awesome in their computer generated special effects. But they are also thinner; they lack the thick layers of character actors who brought depth to the background and refracted the stars’ light, so that it formed a different and more complicated image.

Today, any movie that didn’t show Rick and Ilsa sweatily grappling with each other’s naked bodies in Rick’s apartment above the café would be considered old-fashioned. But graphic sex wipes out ambiguity, and the ambiguity in Casablanca, the uncertainty about events and motives, is one of the things that still entices us.

The world is a cornucopia of grays. I believed the romantic interpretation of Casablanca then - love lost for the good of the world - and believe it now. But it is the very ambiguity of Casablanca that keeps it current. No movie can last if it cannot find new things to say to new generations. Captain Renault, the one gray character in a black and white time, would’ve been amused.

My parents had always told me that I should treat older women with kindness and respect—though I suppose they had never suspected that I would ever be confronting an evil woman in charge of a criminal organization who had killers poised outside our house. Therefore, I might not have treated Ms. E with kindness or respect, and I might have possibly punched her in the face a few times. Not that she treated me with much kindness or respect either. Fistfights in real life are rarely as cool as the ones you see in the movies. Instead, there’s a lot of writhing around on the floor, trying to get in a good shot at the other person and usually failing. At one point, Ms. E locked both of her pantyhosed legs around my head for a brief moment—which was an experience I would prefer to never think of again—but I then drove my knee into some part of her that made her yelp in pain, and I wriggled away.

By the time she was given the role (of Ilsa Lund) in April, Bergman would have accepted a script much worse than Casablanca. She had been stuck in Rochester, New York, where her husband was in medical school, since August, and she despaired of ever making another movie.

By the time she was given the role (of Ilsa Lund) in April, Bergman would have accepted a script much worse than Casablanca. She had been stuck in Rochester, New York, where her husband was in medical school, since August, and she despaired of ever making another movie. She wrote despairing letters to Ruth Roberts from Rochester, New York where her husband Petter Lindstrom, who had been a dentist in Sweden, was preparing to become a neurosurgeon. "I am so fed up with Rochester and Main Street I am ready to cry," she wrote.

Many of the one-liners teach volumes. Some summarize excellence in an entire field in one sentence. As Josh Waitzkin (page 577), chess prodigy and the inspiration behind Searching for Bobby Fischer, might put it, these bite-sized learnings are a way to “learn the macro from the micro.” The process of piecing them together was revelatory. If I thought I saw “the Matrix” before, I was mistaken, or I was only seeing 10% of it. Still, even that 10%—“ islands” of notes on individual mentors—had already changed my life and helped me 10x my results. But after revisiting more than a hundred minds as part of the same fabric, things got very interesting very quickly. For the movie nerds among you, it was like the end of The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects: “The red door knob! The fucking Kobayashi coffee cup! How did I not notice that?! It was right in front of me the whole time!” To help you see the same, I’ve done my best to weave patterns together throughout the book, noting where guests have complementary habits, beliefs, and recommendations. The completed jigsaw puzzle is much greater than the sum of its parts.

It is possible that one of the seven other major studios might have bought and made a movie from Everybody comes to Rick's, an unproduced play about a cynical American who owns a bar in Casablanca. (One producer at M-G-M, Sam Marx, did want to buy the play for $5.000, but his boss didn't think it was worth the money.) It wouldn't have been the same movie, not only because it would have starred Gary Cooper at Paramount, Clark Gable at M-G-M, or Tyrone Power at Fox but because another studio's style would have been more languid, less sardonic, or opulently Technicolored.

But I can keep her sequestered in her room until the case is solved.” “Wonder how long that’ll take, Cy?” “I don’t know. Sometimes it takes years to solve a murder.” The two of us laughed, even though both of us knew that neither of us would be satisfied if the case dragged on. “Okay, Louie, it’s time to inconvenience the guests. Round up the usual suspects.” My partner laughed at my reference to the movie Casablanca, then turned toward the door. Our job wasn’t finished. It had barely begun.